Journey to the End of the Night Read Online Free PDF

I remember now, after Kersuzon was killed that we dreamed up a little trick that suited us fine to keep from getting lost in the darkness. So they were throwing us out of the billet. All right all right. We don't say a word. No griping, no come-back. "Clear out!" old wax face yelled as usual.
    "Yes sir, very good sir."
    And off we'd go in the direction of the gunfire, we didn't wait to be asked twice, all five of us. You'd have thought we were going to pick cherries. It was rolling country around there, the Meuse with its vine-covered hills, grapes that weren't ripe yet, and autumn, wooden villages well dried by three months of summer, highly inflammable.
    We'd noticed that one night when we couldn't figure out where to go. There was always a village burning in the direction of the gunfire. We didn't go too close, we gave that village a wide berth and just watched, like an audience, so to speak, from maybe seven or eight miles away. And every night from then on all kinds of villages would burst into a blaze on the horizon, one after another, we'd be surrounded by them, dozens of burning villages in a circle, up ahead and on both sides, like a crazy carnival, sending up flames that licked the clouds.
    We'd watch the flames as they swallowed up everything, churches and barns, one after another. The haystacks burned higher and livelier than anything else, the beams reared up in the darkness, throwing off sparks, before crashing into a sea of light. Even from ten or fifteen miles away you get a good view of a burning village, It was a merry sight. A tiny hamlet that you wouldn't even notice in the daytime, with ugly, uninteresting country around it, you can't imagine how impressive it can be when it's on fire at night! You'd think it was Notre-Dame! A village, even a small one, takes at least all night to burn, in the end it looks like an enormous flower, then there's only a bud, and after that nothing.
    Smoke rises, and then it's morning.
    We'd leave the horses saddled in a field close by, and they wouldn't move. We'd go and saw wood in the grass, all but one, naturally, who'd take his turn on guard. But when you've got fires to watch, the night passes a lot more pleasantly, it's not a hardship anymore, you're not alone.
    Unfortunately, the villages didn't last ... After a month's time there wasn't a village left in that neck of the woods. The forests were shelled too. They didn't last a week. Forests make nice enough fires, but they don't last.
    After that the roads were all clogged with artillery columns going in one direction and civilians running away in the other.
    So naturally we couldn't go either way, we could only stay where we were. We'd line up for the privilege of getting killed. Even the general couldn't find any billets with no soldiers in them. In the end we were sleeping in the fields, general or no general. Those who still had a bit of spirit lost it. That was when they started shooting men to bolster their morale, whole squadrons, and when our M.P. got a citation for the way in which he was carrying on his little private war, the real honest-to-goodness war. They gave us a short rest, and a few weeks later we climbed back up on our horses and started north. The cold came with us. The gunfire was never far away. But we never came across any Germans except by accident, a hussar or a squad of riflemen here and there, in yellow and green, pretty colors. We seemed to be looking for them, but we beat it the moment we laid eyes on them. At every encounter two or three horsemen bit the dust, sometimes theirs, sometimes ours. And from far in the distance their riderless horses, with loose clanking stirrups, would come galloping toward us, we'd see their saddles with the peculiar cantles and all their leather as fresh and shiny as pocketbooks on New Year's Day. They were coming to see our horses, they made friends in no time. They were lucky. We couldn't have done that.
    One morning when they rode in from a reconnaissance